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Second Day of the COMSOL Conference with Keynotes and Awards

The second day was a very interesting day at the COMSOL Conference. Once again, the keynote presentations were well received, and awards were presented to the best papers and posters during the Awards Dinner.

Thursday’s Three Keynote Speakers

Ercan Dede,
Toyota Research
Institute in
North America

William Vetterling,
ZINK Imaging

Alan Leewood,
MED Institute

Thursday’s keynotes involved three users that presented their research. One of the main threads I found running through the presentations was that they were using COMSOL for multiple purposes. Ercan Dede from Toyota Research Institute in North America was first up and summarized their use of COMSOL within the cooling of electronic parts and through optimizing flow channels. But they had also started using COMSOL for focusing electromagnetic wave phenomena.

Bill Vetterling from ZINK Imaging had deployed COMSOL to many applications including heat transfer, two-phase flow coupled to electrostatics, drying, and pure electrostatic build-up. Bill also gave a great analogy between COMSOL and the Library of Babel, which I’ll blog about later. The third presenter, Alan Leewood, from MED Institute had just one application, RF heating of metal-based devices like stents and the link, as they are put through MRIs. Even so, his talk showed their simulations matching experiment very closely, and included how he went about introducing a new software at his company.

SpaceClaim Minicourse

Minicourses were also going at full strength and I attended one given by one of our partners, SpaceClaim Corporation. Their software fits into the modeling workflow through design modeling package. This lets you bring in any geometry from CAD package and work with the geometry to make it optimized for simulation. SpaceClaim’s interactive tools were very intuitive and a joy to play with. Not having any experience in design or CAD myself, I was creating shapes, boring holes, lofting and creating chamfers within minutes.

Awards Dinner

The day concluded with the Awards Dinner, where a selection of different foods was made available. CEO Svante Littmarck presented the best Paper and Poster awards to James D. Freels and his group from ORNL, Yang Lu and his group from NIST, Edgar Alberto Unigarro Calpa and his group from Universidad de los Andes, Columbia, Lizhu Tong from Keisoku, Japan, Mranal Jain and his group from Louisiana State University, and Matheus Fernandes from Case Western Reserve University. Congratulations to them all.